Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators
followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over
their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the
students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their
books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of
Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez
Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied.
A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on
the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant
messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to
music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the
observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted
whether the students were wearing earbuds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they
should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination
or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their
attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute
mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook
feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent
of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even
though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they
could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was
kind of scary, actually.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing
new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue ofComputers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body
of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while
learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment
while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common
behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or
complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and
neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork,
their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full
attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty
transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice
that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and
even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to
resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone.

The media multitasking habit starts early. In “Generation M2:
Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” a survey conducted by the Kaiser
Family Foundation and published in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said
that when they were doing homework, “most of the time” they were also watching
TV, texting, listening to music, or using some other medium. The lead author of
the study was Victoria Rideout, then a vice president at Kaiser and now an
independent research and policy consultant. Although the study looked at all
aspects of kids’ media use, Rideout told me she was particularly troubled by
its findings regarding media multitasking while doing schoolwork.

“This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying
about how much kids are online or how much kids are media multitasking overall.
It’s multitasking while learning that has the biggest potential downside,” she
says. “I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American
Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are
doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

For older students, the media multitasking habit extends
into the classroom. While most middle and high school students don’t have the
opportunity to text, email, and surf the Internet during class, studies show
the practice is nearly universal among students in college and professional
school. One large survey found that 80 percent of college students
admit to texting during class; 15 percent say they send 11 or more texts in a
single class period.

During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a
practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone. “I ask him, ‘What
was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a
blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many
things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point
home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to
what’s going on in class.” Other professors have taken a more surreptitious
approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human observers to record
whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using them for other,
unauthorized purposes.

Such steps may seem excessive, even paranoid: After all,
isn’t technology increasingly becoming an intentional part of classroom
activities and homework assignments? Educators are using social media sites
like Facebook and Twitter as well as social sites created just for schools,
such as Edmodo, to communicate with students, take class polls, assign
homework, and have students collaborate on projects. But researchers are
concerned about the use of laptops, tablets, cellphones, and other technology
for purposes quite apart from schoolwork. Now that these devices have been
admitted into classrooms and study spaces, it has proven difficult to police
the line between their approved and illicit uses by students.

Inthe study involving spyware, for example, two professors of
business administration at the University of Vermont found that “students
engage in substantial multitasking behavior with their laptops and have
non-course-related software applications open and active about 42 percent of the
time.” The professors, James
Kraushaar and David Novak, obtained students’ permission before
installing the monitoring software on their computers—so, as in Rosen’s study,
the students were engaging in flagrant multitasking even though they knew their
actions were being recorded.

Another study, carried out at St. John’s University in New
York, used human observers stationed at the back of the classroom to record the
technological activities of law students. The spies reported that 58 percent of
second- and third-year law students who had laptops in class were using them
for “non-class purposes” more than half the time. (First-year students were far
more likely to use their computers for taking notes, although an observer did
note one first-year student texting just 17 minutes into her very first
class—the beginning of her law school career.)

Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social
media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake
while learning, according to Rosen. That’s a problem, because these operations
are actually quite mentally complex, and they draw on the same mental
resources—using language, parsing meaning—demanded by schoolwork.

David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of
Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning, takes a
firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the
brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only
when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each
other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and
listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture
while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is
very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the
prefrontal cortex.”

Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at
once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,” he declares. It’s difficult
for anyone to properly evaluate how well his or her own mental processes are
operating, he points out, because most of these processes are unconscious. And,
Meyer adds, “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital
natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking.
They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting
around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to
finish.”

Researchers have documented a cascade of negative outcomes
that occurs when students multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the
assignment takes longer to complete, because of the time spent on distracting
activities and because, upon returning to the assignment, the student has to
refamiliarize himself with the material.

Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and
picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes. The cognitive cost of such
task-switching is especially high when students alternate between tasks that
call for different sets of expressive “rules”—the formal, precise language
required for an English essay, for example, and the casual, friendly tone of an
email to a friend.

Third, students’ subsequent memory of what they’re working
on will be impaired if their attention is divided. Although we often assume
that our memories fail at the moment we can’t recall a fact or concept, the
failure may actually have occurred earlier, at the time we originally saved, or
encoded, the memory. The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention,
and dozens of laboratory studies have demonstrated that when our
attention is divided during encoding, we remember that piece of information
less well—or not at all. As the unlucky student spotlighted by Rosen can
attest, we can’t remember something that never really entered our consciousness
in the first place. And a study last month showed that students who multitask on laptops in class distract not just
themselves but also their peers who see what they’re doing.

Fourth, some research has suggested that when we’re
distracted, our brains actually process and store information in different,
less useful ways. In a 2006 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas–Austin and two
colleagues asked participants to engage in a learning activity on a computer
while also carrying out a second task, counting musical tones that sounded
while they worked. Study subjects who did both tasks at once appeared to learn
just as well as subjects who did the first task by itself. But upon further
probing, the former group proved much less adept at extending and extrapolating
their new knowledge to novel contexts—a key capacity that psychologists call
transfer.

Brain scans taken during Poldrack’s experiment revealed that
different regions of the brain were active under the two conditions, indicating
that the brain engages in a different form of memory when forced to pay
attention to two streams of information at once. The results suggest, the
scientists wrote, that “even if distraction does not decrease the overall level
of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied
less flexibly in new situations.”

Finally, researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media
multitasking while learning is negatively associated with students’ grades. In
Rosen’s study, students who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation
period had lower grade-point averages than those who didn’t go on the site. And
two recent studies by Reynol Junco, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, found that texting and using Facebook—in class and
while doing homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs.
“Engaging in Facebook use or texting while trying to complete schoolwork may
tax students’ capacity for cognitive processing and preclude deeper learning,”
write Junco and a co-author. (Of course, it’s also plausible that the texting
and Facebooking students are those with less willpower or motivation, and thus
likely to have lower GPAs even aside from their use of technology.)

Meyer, of the University of Michigan, worries that the
problem goes beyond poor grades. “There’s a definite possibility that we are
raising a generation that is learning more shallowly than young people in the
past,” he says. “The depth of their processing of information is considerably
less, because of all the distractions available to them as they learn.”

Given that these distractions aren’t going away, academic
and even professional achievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital
temptations while learning—a feat akin to the famous marshmallow test. In a
series of experiments conducted more than 40 years ago, psychologist Walter Mischel tempted young children with a marshmallow,
telling them they could have two of the treats if they put off eating one right
away. Follow-up studies performed years later found that the kids who were
better able to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and test
scores but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.

Two years ago, Rosen and his colleagues conducted an
information-age version of the marshmallow test. College students who
participated in the study were asked to watch a 30-minute videotaped lecture,
during which some were sent eight text messages while others were sent four or
zero text messages. Those who were interrupted more often scored worse on a
test of the lecture’s content; more interestingly, those who responded to the
experimenters’ texts right away scored significantly worse than those
participants who waited to reply until the lecture was over.

This ability to resist the lure of technology can be
consciously cultivated, Rosen maintains. He advises students to take “tech breaks” to satisfy their
cravings for electronic communication: After they’ve labored on their
schoolwork uninterrupted for 15 minutes, they can allow themselves two minutes
to text, check websites, and post to their hearts’ content. Then the devices
get turned off for another 15 minutes of academics.

Over time, Rosen says, students are able extend their
working time to 20, 30, even 45 minutes, as long as they know that an
opportunity to get online awaits. “Young people’s technology use is really
about quelling anxiety,” he contends. “They don’t want to miss out. They don’t
want to be the last person to hear some news, or the ninth person to ‘like’
someone’s post.” Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that must be managed,
he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their best.

Rideout, director of the Kaiser study on kids and media use,
sees an upside for parents in the new focus on multitasking while learning.
“The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete
behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be
hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line
when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when
you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”

Parents shouldn’t feel like ogres when they do so, she adds.
“It’s important to remember that while a lot of kids do media multitask while
doing homework, a lot of them don’t. One out of five kids in our study said
they ‘never’ engage in other media while doing homework, and another one in
five said they do so only ‘a little bit.’ This is not some universal norm that
students and parents can’t buck. This is not an unreasonable thing to ask of
your kid.”

So here’s the takeaway for parents of Generation M: Stop
fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much
they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the
social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when
they’re doing schoolwork, the cellphones are silent, the video screens are
dark, and that every last window is closed but one.

This story was produced byThe Hechinger Report,
a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College,
Columbia University, and MindShift, a news website focusing on innovations in
education and new trends in teaching and learning.

Will it be the
next big thing?Tata Motors of India thinks so. What will
the Oil Companies do to stop it?

It is an auto engine that runs on air.That's right;
air not gas or diesel or electric, but just the air around us.Tata Motors of India has scheduled the Air Car to hit
Indian street.

The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy
N. For Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air to push its engine's
pistons and make the car go.The Air Car, called the "Mini
CAT" could cost around 365,757 rupees in India or $8,177
US.The Mini CAT which is a simple, light urban car, with a
tubular chassis, a body of fiberglass that is glued not welded and powered
by compressed air.A Microprocessor is used to control all electrical
functions of the car.One tiny radio transmitter sends instructions to
the lights, turn signals and every other electrical device on the
car.Which are not many.The temperature of the clean air
expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0-15 degrees below zero, which makes
it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for
gases or loss of power.There are no keys, just an access card
which can be read by the car from your pocket.According to the
designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100 KM, that's about a tenth the
cost of a car running on gas.It's mileage is about double that of the
most advanced electric car, a factor which makes it a perfect choice for
city motorists.The car has a top speed of 105 KM per hour or 60 mph and
would have a range of around 300 km or 185 miles between refuels. Refilling
the car will take place at adapted gas stations with special air
compressors.A fill up will only take two to three minutes and costs
approximately 100 rupees ($1.78 CAD!) and the car will be ready to go
another 300 kilometers.This car can also be filled at home
with it's on board compressor.It will take 3-4 hours to refill the tank,
but it can be done while you sleep.Because there is no
combustion engine, changing the 1 liter of vegetable oil is only necessary
every 50,000 KM or 30,000 miles. Due to its simplicity, there
is very little maintenance to be done on this car.

Introduction

Technology news is full of incremental developments, but few of them are true milestones. Here we’re citing 10 that are. These advances from the past year all solve thorny problems or create powerful new ways of using technology. They are breakthroughs that will matter for years to come.